This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Every man stamps his value on himself. The price we challenge for ourselves is given us by others. Man is made great or little by his own will." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
"With the gain of knowledge, connect the habit of imparting it. This increases mental wealth by putting it in circulation; and it enhances the value of our knowledge to ourselves, not only in its depth, confirmation and readiness for use, but in that acquaintance with human nature, that self-command, and that reaction of moral training upon ourselves, which are above all price." - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley
"Life is of little value unless it be consecrated by duty." - Samuel Smiles
"The value of compassion cannot be over-emphasized. Anyone can criticize. It takes a true believer to be compassionate. No greater burden can be borne by an individual than to know no one cares or understands." - Arthur Stainback, fully Arthur House Stainback
"Money has little value to its possessor unless it also has value to others." - Leland Stanford, fully Amasa Leland Stanford
"The physical loss is not sufficient for mourning. Purely on a physical level what would a person gain if he lived many more years? What is the ultimate gain in devouring hundreds more chickens and thousands more loaves of bread? What is the overall difference if the deceased left all this to others? The Torah obligates us to mourn to emphasize the loss of the true value of life; which is the spiritual elevation a person could have gained if he were still alive. The Almighty placed him on this earth for this purpose. The person’s death should remind the mourners to fill their lives with the spiritual growth that they are capable of." - Yechiel Michel Tukatinsky
"Most forms of human creativity have one aspect n common: the attempt to give some sense to the various impressions, emotions, experiences, and actions that fill our lives, and thereby to give some meaning and value to our existence... The crisis of our time in the Western world is that the search for meaning has become meaningless for many of us." - Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf
"The foolish and vulgar are always accustomed to value equally the good and the bad." - Charles Yriarte
"The pleasure we feel with what we have does not come only from the thing itself, but also from whom we received it. That is the lessons of the blessings we make. They help us appreciate that the Almighty is the One who has bestowed us with the pleasures of this world - this awareness greatly enhances the value of these pleasures." -
"I often marvel how it is that though each man loves himself beyond all else, he should yet value his own opinion of himself less than that of others." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
"This is a property of the rational soul, love of one’s neighbor, and truth and modesty, and to value nothing more than itself, which is also the property of Law. Thus then right reason differs not at all from the reason of justice." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
"Never respect men merely for their riches, but rather for their philanthropy; we don't value the sun for its height." - Kenneth Eldon Bailey
"Never respect men merely for their riches, but rather for their philanthropy; we do not value the sun for its height, but for its use." - Gamaliel Bailey
"Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people." - John Barth, fully John Simmons Barth
"Reenchantment with the Earth as a living reality is the condition for our rescue of the Earth from the impending destruction we are imposing on it. To carry this out effectively, we must now, in a sense, reinvent the human as a species within the community of life species. Our sense reality and of value must consciously shift from an anthropocentric to a biocentric norm of reference." -
"What man knows should find expression in what he does. The chief value of superior knowledge is that it leads to a performing manhood." - John Christian Bovee
"The more a man desirous to pass at a value above his worth, and can, by dignified silence, contrast with the garrulity of trivial minds, the more will the world give him credit for the wealth he does not possess." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Praise, like gold and diamond,s owes its value only to its scarcity." - Samuel Butler
"A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
"Some people, in working toward a goal, find themselves seized by inertia when it comes time for action. If this should happen to you, despite the small graduated steps, then it is time to reexamine your goal. Consider how important it actually is and then either discard the goal and replace it with a more suitable one or continue the steps with a renewed sense of the value of achieving it." - Fitzhugh Dodson
"Do not value money for any more nor any less than its worth; it is a good servant but a bad master." - Alexandre Dumas, born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie
"The benefit of proverbs, or maxims, is that they separate those who act on principle from those who act on impulse; and they lead to promptness and decision in acting. Their value deepens on four things; do they embody correct principles; are they on important subjects; what is the extent, and what is the ease of their application?" - Tyron Edwards
"The great task of peace is to work morals into it. The only sort of peace that will be real is one in which everybody takes his share or responsibility. World organizations and conferences will be of no value unless there is improvement in the relation of men to men." - Frederic Eggleston, fully Sir Frederic William Eggleston
"Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary." - Albert Einstein
"All the value of education rests in the respect for the physical, intellectual and moral will of the child." - Francisco Ferrer y Guardia
"The hoarding of things cannot produce joy. Love is of no value in producing happiness unless it is used or passed on to make others happy." - Lowell Fillmore
"Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctions; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true." - Michel Foucault
"Wars can never cease so long as nations live under such widely differing conditions, so long as the value of individual life is in each nation so variously computed, and so long as the animosities which divide them represent such powerful instinctual forces in the mind." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things." - George F Gilder
"We crave freedom, but freedom is never an end in itself; it is a means to be used for further aims. Its value lies in the extent to which it can assist the development of life. To possess freedom with no life for which to use it is but the bitterest farce. Life never means complete freedom, and every action and relation is an added bond. Life is to be attained, not through a non-moral freedom of caprice, but through a glad welcoming and loyal fulfillment of every bond and obligation which comes in the daily path of life." - Edward Howard Griggs
"The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
"To learn the value of money, it is not necessary to know the nice things it can get for you, you have to have experienced the trouble of getting it." - Philippe Hériat, pen name of Raymond-Gerard Payelle
"A great man is a gift, in some measure of a revelation of God. A great man, living for high ends, is the divinest thing that can be seen on earth. The value and interest of history are derived chiefly from the lives and services of the eminent men whom it commemorates." - George Stillman Hillard
"Our children should be fitted for bread-winning, but they should be taught that bread-winning is only a means, not the purpose in life, and that the value of life is to be judged... by the good and the service to God with which it is filled." - Samson Raphael Hirsch
"As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder." - Mahlon Hoagland
"It’s universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get the one-to-one level, and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-business, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person’s crime is another person’s profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals and how much." - Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman
"The enduring value of religion is in its challenge to aspiration and hope in the mind of man." - Ernest Martin Hopkins
"The external part of religion is doubtless of little value in comparison with the internal, and so is the cask in comparison with the wine contained in it: but if the cask be staved in, the wine must perish." - George Horne
"We are not only made in God’s image, but that we are made to image God - to reflect His freedom, joy, compassion and peace in our lives... When religion becomes reduced to an outward observation of rules and ceremonies and an intolerance toward the beliefs of others, we are mistaking the oyster for the pearl. The oyster is certainly valuable, but it is of infinitely greater value when it promotes the growth of the pearl... We cannot reason our way back to the roots of religion. We cannot trap God in stale dogmas or narrow creeds. Our purpose is to make religion a continuous living experience, to lead us toward a resurrection not of the dead but of the living who are dead to their own truth. Then religion becomes a thread that can both link us to the past and guide us to our future." - Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
"The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things." - William Ralph Inge
"Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, through it may be increased by short intermissions. What we have missed long enough to want it, we value more when it is regained; but that which has been lost till it is forgotten will be found at last with little gladness, and with still less if a substitute has supplied the place." -
"Wealth is nothing in itself; it is not useful but when it departs from us; its value is found only in that which it can purchase. As to corporeal enjoyment, money can neither open new avenues of pleasure, nor block up the passages of anguish. Disease and infirmity still continue to torture and enfeeble, perhaps exasperated by luxury, or promoted by softness. With respect to the mind, it has rarely been observed that wealth contributes much to quicken the discernment or elevate the imagination, but may, by hiring flattery, or laying diligence asleep, confirm error and harden stupidity." -
"It is labor... which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything." - John Locke
"Proverbs are in the world of thought what gold coin is in the world of business - great value in small compass, and equally current among all people. Sometimes the proverb may be false, the coin counterfeit, but in both cases the false proves the value of the true." - Daniel March
"The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time." - Jacques Maritain
"Gifts, however great, lose their value when the giver boasts of them." - Martial, full name Marcus Valarius Martialis NULL
"Women who set low value on themselves make life hard for all women." - Nellie McClung